"Live Free or Die" Replaced by "What About Me?"

I was listening to the re-run of the obvious spinster-to-be named Jenny Ballantine who was kvetching and whining in New Hampshire in front of the Edwards "Couple" on Rush Limbaugh's radio show and I thought of that flag with the snake that said "Don't Tread on Me." Whatever happened to the rock-ribbed New Englanders that Norman Rockwell immortalized back in the day when Life Magazine and Saturday Evening Post covers portrayed a different reality, one of a nation that worked out its difficulties through grit and gumption? Here are Jenny's immortal cries for posterity:

I have no idea what I want to do when I grow up. I don't know what I want to be when I'm an adult. But I'm 22 right now, so people are like, "Honey, you are an adult." You know what? It's about me. It's about me voting for you or supporting somebody who's going to be the next president. So it's all about me right now. Just give me something.

"JUST GIVE ME SOMETHING!" could be the last bleat/motto of the baby boomers as they begin to subside into the defirmities of age and decrepitude. They want guarantees.

Remember the independence, the self-sufficiency, the idea that hard work and keeping your shoulder to the wheel might bring success? We all got along with a little or a lot of help from friends, but now folks like Jenny look to government, big government, to fill in what family, the consolations of religion and friends can't provide. Not that big government works very well, as one might notice if one notes the discrepancies between constant and incessant bureaucratic foul-ups and the media hue and cry that more bureaucracy is the answer. But one doesn't notice those things if one asks what one's country can do for one and not vice-versa.

Even the Edwards family knows tragedy, but read the transcript and bathe in the bromides of John's reply as his hirsutely-perfect head nods in recognition of Jenny's plight.

There's another version that fits for most of the people on the planet outside the USA, Europe, Japan and some oil-rich enclaves in the Middle East: "Life's a bitch and then you die."